The Journal

We are Chantri and Nicole, an Idaho based photography team specializing our work in artistic portraits, weddings and commercial fashion.
Our hearts lay in the hands of our little ones. Between us we have seven (7) children, who are our whole world! We love documenting the little moments of our personal lives through beautiful imagery & are passionate about teaching other moms & lifestyle
bloggers to do the same.

We are extremely excited to be able to offer our BIGGEST sale of all times! For two days only (until midnight 1/28th) our digital education bundle will be on sale at an astonishing 89% OFF! That’s a value of $124.99 for ONLY $14.99!

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

True Atelier’s popular photography education for moms and other photography enthusiasts is now available in a digital bundle priced at $110 OFF for these two days ONLY! This amazing educational set contains:

DIGITAL VOLUME ONE | PHOTOGRAPHY A GUIDE FOR ENTHUSIASTS (retail: $49.99)
- Simple and practical applications for beautiful everyday photos, whether you use a dSLR, a point-and-shoot, or a camera phone (in PDF format for digital reading). True Atelier’s complete mentoring guide in gorgeous magazine layout leaves no stone unturned when it comes to educational topics for the photography lover. This guide is great for mothers, bloggers, entrepreneurs, or hobbyists. This in depth digital magazine will help you master your dSLR camera, manual mode, lighting, compostion, and more, including practical applications for shooting with any type of camera (ie. a point-and-shoot or a camera phone.) Pair it with True Atelier’s EVERYDAY WORKFLOW ACTION SET and EDITING VIDEO and you have access to True Atelier’s complete training kit.

These time saving actions give you clean, crisp and classic looking edits that work for location, back-lit, and studio images. This powerful action set gives you the 9 customizable actions that the ladies of True Atelier use on EVERY session, EVERY DAY! * Please note that these actions are designed for Photoshop CS3 and above. These actions are NOT fully compatible with Photoshop Elements as you must have access to layers.

EVERYDAY WORKFLOW EDITING VIDEO: (retail: $34.99)
- The ladies of True Atelier take you step-by-step, through their everyday editing workflow. Glean from a full hour of video instruction with details on downloading, backing up, rating and choosing images, editing in Adobe Camera Raw, Photoshop, and saving for both print and web. See live screen shots of the editing process for images from outdoor sessions, back-lit sessions, and studio sessions.

BONUS VIDEO | RECORDING YOUR OWN ACTIONS IN PHOTOSHOP: (retail: $4.99)
- Learn how to create and record your VERY OWN actions in Photoshop.

This entire bundle will be delivered via email with links to download materials, and links and passwords for videos. No Shipping will be charged with this deal.

If you follow me, Chantri, on Instagram (@chantrikeele) you know that I’ve been busy at work planning my “buggies” two year birthday party! I’m not exactly sure how or why Hudson was given the nickname “buggie”– but it has stuck! Of course, with me being non-traditional and all, I couldn’t stick with a normal birthday themes! I thought it was only appropriate to have a ‘BUG’ THEMED birthday party… while he still doesn’t have much of an opinion on it!

So, It had to be buggy, but it had to have style as well! Most of you know that I am a HUGE fan of WHITE, CREAM, TAN & BLACK. I’d practically live in a all white house if someone could come in and spray it all that way! So since those are not the typical party colors, I thought, why not have the majority of the details white, cream, tan & black, with pops of color from the food? And that is where the silhouette idea came in! From there it turned into a BUG ADVENTURE PARTY! The kids were sent on a bug scavenger hunt around the yard. There were 9 bugs total, each with a treasure in a bag or a box beneath the bug. Being that there were sixteen children, ranging from 7 months to 8 years old, it was quite the adventure!

We sent invitations to Hudson’s cousins, nana & papa and best friends!

The day of the party arrived, the kids were excited to found their name on a messenger bag which had their T’s and folded inside. Each one was couldn’t wait to put on their shirts! Here are all the cute bugs…

Refreshments were:

Chocolate Marshmallow Coconut Cream Cheese Mini Cupcakes

Chocolate Raspberry Cream Cheese Mini Cupcakes

Fruit Kabobs

Sugar Cookies decorated with Royal Frosting

Pudding Dirt Cups

Apple Juice- Juice boxes

One of the activities were to decorate a ladybug or bumble bee bug jar. Purchased HERE.

Did you know that aside from the editing software you use for photos and video, all you will ever need to run your photography business effectively can be found in the compact AMAZINGNESS of an iPad? Tack your cell phone on to that, and you have a complete office on the go! One of our last Teaching Tuesday Tutorials for The Chic Critique Forum talked about how we streamline our business with the iPAD, and we wanted to share it HERE with OUR readers for a “favorites Friday” post.

Since we have added the iPad to our ‘must have’ equipment list, we have been so happy with how it has allowed us to balance our lives as wives and mothers with our responsibilities as business owners. If you are considering ditching your stack of notebooks, calendars and a bulky laptop for the convenience of an iPad, we are here to tell you that the choice has really streamlined how we run our business.

Here is a list of our favorite apps that will help you run and organize your business, all available from the APPLE APP STORE or through the app store on your device.

1.) Planner Plus: is a free productivity app that allows you to sync google calendars and other shared calendars within a “planner” style interface complete with different views (day, week, and month.) It also provides task windows that allow you to remind yourself of tasks and to-do lists, and even share and delegate responsibilities. This app has been invaluable for our business since we are a partnership. We are able to use the calendars within the planner for personal and family scheduling, but also view our shared True Atelier calendar that is constantly syncing and updating, keeping us abreast of what is going on for the week/ month.

2.) Paper by Fifty Three: is a gorgeous and creative app that allows you to create notebooks, take notes, doodle, design, paint, and so much more. The sky is the limit with this app if you need an artistic outlet to get your thoughts and ideas out on “paper.” We use it quickly jot down blog ideas, business notes, design and logo ideas, within different delegated (and beautiful looking) notebooks. We have separate notebooks for home/ family, studio/ business, blog, and journaling. Also, instantly share notebook pages via email and social media with a click of a button. Send clients or business partners your list of ideas the moment they hit the paper!

3.) Receipts HD: is a free productivity app that helps you organize and track your personal and business expenses (including mileage) with charts, graphs, and printable reports that can be sent to your accountant with the click of a button. Scan in your receipts for organization and track bank accounts, spending and budget.

4.) Dropbox: is a free digital mailbox where you can share images online between all your devices and invite others to view and download your folders. This is essential for our business! Not only do we put session images into folders to share with commercial clients and collaborative vendors, but we have folders for blog posts and instagram so we can access our edited images from our desktop computers on our iPad’s and phones. This makes it possible to send links, instagram, and create blog posts on the go, while at meetings, running errands, or hanging out at our son’s baseball game.

5.) PicCollage: is a free photo/video app that allows you to make collages and inspiration boards from the images in your iPad’s library. Simply save images from the web/ pinterest/ recent shoots/dropbox/or screen shots, to create multi-purpose boards. It’s super fast and it’s super easy!!!!! We use ours to create wardrobe boards for commercial sessions, inspiration boards for clients and styled shoots with other vendors, and branding and idea boards to organize our personal and professional ideas. Share these boards with clients and vendors via text, email or face book message, to get everyone on the same page for a shoot.

Give these apps a try to help you streamline your business and make more time for your families and yourselves.

Nicole Klingler and Chantri Keele are Idaho based, national wedding and portrait photographers with an affinity for all things styled and editorial. Their work has been featured on popular photography resources like SENIOROLOGIE and LEMONADE & LENSES, as well as in print in CHIC MAGAZINE, the IDAHO WEDDING GUIDE, and IDAHO WEDDINGS magazine. Nicole and Chantri love sharing what they have learned with other photographers in the industry through blogging and classes. Check them out at www.trueatelierblog.com , through their other social media platforms like instagramor facebook, or visit them at their studio in the historic downtown of Idaho Falls.

I love eating! Especially scrumptious calorie packed sweet goodness recipes and spending hours baking in the kitchen… probably all too often! However, I think it’s about time I start listening to my body and realizing the damage I’m causing it by not eating healthy foods 90% of the time. See, I’m the type that can live on breads, pastas, sweets etc. and eat very little nutrients throughout the day. Just snack on junk. It’s terrible.

For the past couple of months I have been cutting out a large percentage of Gluten out of my diet, only consuming small amounts daily! I know that I’m not totally allergic, but I have become aware that I have a certain level of intolerance to it. It’s a bit of an awkward subject to discuss… hahahaha… the logistics of a human body! But, to keep light on the matter I’ll just jump right to our solution… BEANO! If I splurge and have anything with wheat and even fruits and vegetables, Beano to the rescue!!

Naturally, a “healthier” cooking lifestyle has come out of this and it quite possibly has become a bit of a daily challenge! Or rather, an obsession- to create yummy things with healthy (tummy & physique friendly) foods!

This concoction came from a sweet craving morning! I am a lover of breakfast and usually stick with my egg omelet and rice cake … but there are just some mornings when I’m drawn right to the cookies and if I don’t have an interception, well, the other team (the junk food lovin’ devil on my shoulder) wins the game!

Are you ready for this? The most delicious ‘coconut, cinnamon, a tiny bit of sugar, chewy, fruity, protein packed’… breakfast i’ve EVER had!!